What rings true about “Steel Magnolias” is its familiarity. Anyone who’s lived in a small town, in the South, or had their hair done at a beauty shop will see themselves somehow in the story of the women who congregate at Truvy’s salon in small-town Louisiana for [...]

There’s something about the sheer joy and enthusiasm radiating from a cast of theater kids singing and dancing their little hearts out in a musical that can charm the most seasoned theatergoer. And the young people who opened South Valley Civic Theatre’s 51st season with [...]

Riley Brown has gotten a little tired of playing boys in community theater productions, from the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz to Jack in Into the Woods. So she’s thrilled to be able to get her princess on as the title character in South Valley Civic Theatre’s production [...]

Six sisters, some more estranged than others, must face the crisis of their widowed mother behaving badly at her nursing home in Belles: The Reunion, a comedy/drama by Mark Dunn running this summer at Limelight Actors Theater in Gilroy. But the immediate issue—Mom disrobing in [...]

Limelight Actors Theater co-founder and director Kevin Heath often stumbles onto a script for the company while he’s looking for something else. In the case of the company’s summer show, Belles: The Reunion, Heath already had read the script and seen a production of the [...]

Let’s be clear: There’s one star, and one star only, in that classic tale of show-business mothers and daughters, Gypsy. And it’s not the legendary strip-tease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s her bulldozer of a stage mother, Mama Rose. South Valley Civic Theatre sticks to [...]

There never was a stage mother before or since who was as horrifying as Rose Horvick, the tyrant at the heart of Gypsy, the Tony Award-winning 1959 musical that will bring South Valley Civic Theatre’s 50th anniversary season to a close. Gypsy, loosely based on the memoirs of [...]